HMRC - Back To The Office And More Bang For Your Buck
We were assured this will only apply to "those whose roles are unsuited to working from home." As I said when talking about the early days of the lockdown here the definition of not being able to do your job remotely was always a bit ambiguous. It turned out that the technology allowed more people to work from home than we'd previously been led to believe. But some sections of HMRC doubted how effective that work from home was. Perhaps that was what the Prime Minister was thinking of when he said "people have had quite a few days off" and should make a stab at going back to the office. "Fair play, we've given you that time off so you didn't spread Covid, but let's not pretend you were actually working hard."
Maybe Johnson had been given a kick by the Chancellor. Earlier in the week, Rishi Sunak had worried about the effect of continued working from home on public transport and other businesses which rely on office workers taking lunch breaks such as coffee and sandwich shops.
At this point, anyone affected by the Building Our Future office cull programme could be excused some hollow laughter. When the closure of regional offices was first announced, there had been a massive corporate shoulder shrug to the potential effect on local high streets. Local MP's took a disappointingly "nothing to see here" stance. Maybe those high streets just weren't big enough for the Chancellor to notice.
I wrote here about what I saw as the difference between working at home and working in a half-empty office. The best thing about working in the office during lockdown was having the space to move about, after days of sitting behind a laptop in the coal shed for eight hours. I know some HMRC managers don't like staff moving about. They feel safer if everyone is wedged behind their computers. So, the staff might as well be working from home. For a manager the only advantage of having the staff in the office is that you can look up at any time and see what they're up to.
Point of order: There are legal requirements for all workers to take "periodic" screen breaks. All employers have a duty of care to ensure staff aren't injured by poor posture or repetitive actions. That's why I was hacked off by a divisive article in the Daily Mail on 22nd November last year - "The £10 Million Lockdown Spending Spree." This "joint investigation" by the Mail and the Taxpayer's Alliance told its readers that, "While billions of Britons are struggling on shared dining tables or working from bedrooms, Whitehall staff have used taxpayers' cash to buy top of the range kit for their home offices."
"HMRC alone used almost £4 million of public taxes on working from home, with its staff spending £500,000 on transporting office furniture to employees homes. HMRC were also given an allowance of £80 for an office chair and £120 for a desk."
The first point to make is that - incomprehensible as it may be to a journalist - HMRC staff were also working on dining tables or in kitchens or bedrooms. They were often having to work around partners and children who had had also been sent home. Luckily, HMRC had replaced its desktop computers with laptops and docking stations, so it was relatively easy to get everyone working from home at short notice. But that was just the laptops.
If you have a member of staff whose job or situation qualifies them to be a homeworker, you'd usually go through an extended process where the IT subcontractor visited their home and installed a docking station and keyboard and screens. You'd also arrange for any furniture they needed to be delivered. But the lockdown wasn't a considered process. It was an emergency.
As for the £500, 000 move of office furniture, under health and safety at work rules, some staff had been given health assessments. As a result they'd been personally issued with specialist chairs and other equipment to reduce the risk of back injuries or repetitive strain injury. This was the specialist office furniture that cost £500,000 to move to staff's homes.
The additional allowance for staff to buy a chair and desk was for those people who didn't have specialist equipment. This is the basic health duty of care expected of any employer. As an arm of Government, the civil service is - of course - expected to carry out its legal obligations.
It says a lot to me about what's going on in the private sector that the people behind the Taxpayers Alliance obviously think the employer's duty of care to the health and wellbeing of staff is some kind of frippery that can be done without. That they could wave it in front of people as some kind of perk that the gilded public sector were getting and the private sector wasn't.
As for moving staff back to the office, I suppose it's none of my business now that I'm outside the tent. My biggest concern is that Johnson and Sunak will expect to see a big jump in productivity as a result.
Before the lockdown, HMRC was in the middle of giving people "More Bang For Your Buck" by streamlining and automating processes. That wasn't going well, even before Brexit. Once more people get back to work, there's a chance that they'll start rubbing up against the obstacles that our new status as a non-EU state have created. And that will create more work for HMRC.
But even if that doesn't happen, there'll be all the diversions that are a normal part of working in an office. I've said before that HMRC takes a lot of practices from the private sector. A lot of this has to do with engaging and empowering staff. But it also takes them away from their core activity. To take a simple example, if you need to remind staff about changes to the rules on data security, you have to take them away somewhere quiet, sit them down, go through it with them, and check that they've understood. That's an hour taking them away from their core activity. But you need to do it. I don't think there's anyone - even the Taxpayer's Alliance - who would say that was a frippery of the gilded Civil Service.
But, I think it's fair to say that during lockdown a lot of these meetings fell by the wayside. The first couple of weeks of Working From Home, I remember we got challenged on our statistics because they were too good. It didn't fit hymn number 212 in your hymn books, "Thy Flock Will Skive If Gambolling In The Fields". In fact the lambs were able to concentrate on their core activity and get more work done than usual.
I'm not saying that when they move back into the office, staff should work 100% on their core activity. The mandatory meetings cover a lot of important ground - even if they are boring. But my personal biased opinion is that on the day HMRC staff march back into the office like the factory workers following Gracie Fields in "Sing As We Go", we shouldn't expect to see productivity top Gracie's highest note.
